February is a short month and I had a lot of work to do, so my reading slowed down a little.
Fiction
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro returns to the kind of dystopic near-future he explored so effectively in Never Let Me Go. Here, rather than clones, we have Artificial Friends, advanced robots who serve as companions for children who have been "lifted." Exactly what lifting is was not clear to me, but children who are lifted stop going to school and learn at home on "oblongs" to get a competitive advantage in college and, subsequently, adult life. Lifting also puts the children's health in jeopardy. The novel's narrator, AF Klara, is purchased as a companion for Josie, who has been lifted and is quite seriously ill. Josie's neighbor and friend, Rick, is a bright boy who has not been lifted; through Rick, we see how a class system emerges around this choice made by parents. Klara runs on solar power and thus believes the sun has healing powers that could help Josie. As he often does, Ishiguro writes in a somewhat flat tone--appropriate for a robot narrator--that still manages to convey deep emotion. I'm not doing a good job conveying any sense of the book, but I did enjoy it and found it, again as Ishiguro's novels generally do, prompted me to reflect on what it means to be human.
Chang-Rae Lee is an author whose work I have enjoyed, but his most recent--My Year Abroad--disappointed. The novel's protagonist is Tiller, a 20-year-old college student from New Jersey, who is living with an older woman Val and her eight-year-old son Victor Jr. who is a gifted chef. Val is in witness protection because she ratted out her husband, a minor gangster. Tiller is concerned that Val will kill herself; meanwhile, he is working through his own traumas from his motherless childhood and his year in Asia, when he was supposed to be studying abroad but somehow got caught up in a of a frozen yogurt king who is trying to sell healthy smoothies to the Asian market. Mostly the book added up to nothing for me, but I did enjoy some of the descriptions of the dishes Vic Jr. was creating!
Mystery/Thriller
I am about to conclude that I have read too many mysteries, as lately I am finding mysteries either too predictable (When You Are Mine, by Michael Robotham), too reliant on coincidence (City of the Dead, by Jonathan Kellerman), or gratuitously violent in a way not really needed to move the plot (Every Last Fear, by Alex Finlay). So why don't I just stop reading mysteries? I can only conclude I need extended periods of mindlessness. Indeed, right now, I'm listening to one mystery and reading another in print. Perhaps I need a reading therapist.
Science Fiction
A few years ago, my son Kevin convinced me to read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I liked it a lot and followed up with Anathem, which I also liked. Then I read a couple more that I wasn't so fond of (Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash). Now along comes Termination Shock, which has convinced me I'm through with Stephenson. Termination Shock is set in the near future when climate change has become worse. A Texas oilman has come up with a plan to combat climate change by shooting sulfur into the atmosphere. He draws together powerful people from low-lying countries/cities for a demonstration, in hopes of garnering their support (he is unconcerned that his plan will have negative impacts on other areas. Also in play are a hunter of feral pigs and a Sikh Canadian martial artist. While Stephenson may have serious points (and they may be bad, if he is suggesting that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos might solve the problem of climate change with a large-scale project undertaken on their own), but the characters and their interactions are so farcical that when I fell asleep while listening, I couldn't bring myself to go back and listen to the minutes I slept through.
Nonfiction
Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin is a memoir cum literary analysis (and I love the title). Griffin is a professor who teaches courses on African American literature so her knowledge is both deep and wide. Her own life has clearly and understandably been shaped by the experience of losing her father due to bigotry-motivated mistreatment of her father by the police. She connects her early experiences learning from her father, his death, the way the community rallied around her and her mother afterwards, and other family stories to the themes of great work by black authors: death, mercy, love, Black freedom and the ideal of America, justice, rage and resistance, joy, and beauty. I found both Griffin's personal story and literary analysis interesting, although her certitude made me wonder what it might be like to be a student who disagreed with her. I did have some quarrels with her take-down of President Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech, which I believe is one of the all-time great speeches--but her critique did cause me to think, which isn't a bad thing.
Favorite Passages
This is the power of literature: to use language to remind us of another's humanity by touching our own.
-- Farah Jasmine Griffin, in Read Until You Understand
Until recently, I didn't think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.
-- Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
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